So far the tweet has garnered 7,000 retweets and more than 24,000 likes.

The comments from Mr Thiel, who has been one of Mr Trump’s main supporters in Silicon Valley, were made in a speech at the National Conservatism conference in Washington DC this weekend.

According to the Bloomberg news agency, Mr Thiel also asked if the kind of artificial intelligence systems being developed by Google’s sister company DeepMind should be considered to be a potential “military weapon”.

Mr Thiel was an early investor in the London-based AI start-up before it was acquired by Google’s parent company Alphabet.